Being a successful Asterisk Consultant

A while back, John Todd from Digium, had posted an entry on the Digium blog web site, regarding how to be a successfull Asterisk consultant. While I completely agree with John’s views on the matter, from obtaining a dCAP certificate to the involvement with the community – there are a few points missing from that post, at least in my view. I will try to add some additional information here, in the hopes that it may help you build your business.

Point 1 – Stay Focused

Most of us Asterisk consultants come from diversified areas of expertise. Most of us are plain old IP sysadmins or network managers who got thrown into the Asterisk world due to a requirement – got hooked on it and simply continued onwards. Some of us are developers, some web oriented, some core oriented, but developers yet. The diversity of most Asterisk consultants skill set can easily side track them.

When I say side track, I don’t meant that they don’t know what they are doing, I mean – it’s easy to try and swallow more than they can chew at one time. For example, example a sysadmin turning into an Asterisk consultant, after installing over 200 Asterisk systems. Now, a customer comes to him and says: “Well, I’m gonna give you the work, but I want you to also take over the various IT management aspects of the system.” – If at this point you will say: “YES” you are more of less dooming your business. You are an Asterisk consultant, no matter how a talented IT sysadmin you are, going about and taking both roles on your self would render you in a situation where you, at some point, will be in a situation where you are handling an extreme IT condition at that customer, rendering completely incapable of rendering services to your other customers. Remember, stay focused on what you do, you won’t run into a situation where you will be forced to hurt a customer.

Point 2 – Earning more is sometimes loosing money

This point relates directly to the previous one. Let us imagine that I’m an Asterisk developer with a background of Web development. When confronted with a project that may include both Asterisk and Web Development – the most logical answer would be “YES” – however, web developers tend to forget that they are working autonomously. Most web developers are backed up by teams of graphic artists, database developers, database managers and IT managers. Thus, a web application is much more than the web logic involved with it. Are you an all encompassing developer, capable of cater to all aspects of a web development project and an Asterisk project? if you have your own in house DBA and other resources, you should be fine, however, if you don’t – at some point in the project – you will be forced to outsource the work to a 3rd party – thus, lowering your net income on the project. So, by taking such a project you believe you will be earning more money, while in fact, at the end of the project you may end up in debt to 3rd party sub-contractors you hired.

Point 3 – Be true with yourself

Always be true and honest with yourself and always ask yourself: “is this really a deal that will advance me? or may it actually set me back?” – failing to answer these two questions for every project you are about to take on will end up with some disappointment. Remember, you can fool all people some of the time, you can fool a few people all the time – can you can’t fool yourself! You are your own worse judge, jury and executioner. If you end up doing a project that doesn’t feel right for you, or something with the various aspects of the project troubles your no a moral ground, at some point in time, it will creep up on you and bite you back in the ass.

Point 4 – Use it, don’t abuse it

We all deal with various aspects of the Asterisk project, an Open Source project at its core. It’s very easy to become side tracked by large sums of money, in order to either violate a GPL code or doing something which is completely negated to the Open Source spirit or the Asterisk community. Sure, you will abuse Asterisk and/or other Open Source Asterisk related projects, however, at some point, it will be discovered and your name will be smudged. For example, if you integrate ViciDial to a customer, tell them it’s ViciDial and don’t change its logo to something else. Same applies to FreePBX, A2Billing or other Asterisk related packages – at some point your customer will find out you integrated Open Source – and you will be branded a cheat.

For example, 2 weeks ago I was at a call center, where one of Israel’s leading Asterisk integrator had built a dialer platform for the call center. The call center manager told me that they paid a sum of about 120,000 Israeli Shekels (approx 30,000$) for that dialer. I was really interested to see the product, while the only thing I saw was a “logo” modified “ViciDial” with a couple of hooks into FreePBX (that also had its logo changed to the company logo). The customer was sure he was getting a personalised job, while actually, the entire amount of work done can be amounted to about 12-16 hours of work. Ok, so the hardware costs about 8000USD – still, 22,000$ for installing and modifying two pages on ViciDial – you can’t say that is right – is it?

Conclusion

Always be true to yourself, to your customers and to the community – you’ll never loose.

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2 thoughts on “Being a successful Asterisk Consultant”

I totally agree with your comment. What you mention about this company charging a lot of money for something they didn’t do, it’s a theft.

Personally I’ll like to asked you something:
I’m working for a small company, who has decided after 3 years going to dCap cert and they choose me. Since I’m an employee, do you think this will be a positive or negative approach to get de cert?

The dCAP is a wonderful tool to prove your Asterisk abilities. While many people regard certs as a waste of time and money, in the case of the dCAP I disagree. The dCAP test is far from being a “study and get tested” exam, without proper Asterisk experience and know-how: YOU WILL NOT PASS.
I did my dCAP after working for 4 years with Asterisk, and I found some portions of it confusing and complicated at times. I did end up earning over 95% of the theory exam and 100% on the practical exam, but I have to admit that at times, some of the questions got me completely running around in circles thinking: “WHAT THE …..”.
If you company is willing to pay for your cert, that is a wonderful thing. It’s a show of confidence, on their side, of your abilities – while showing a keen interest in becoming a valid Asterisk professional and supporter. Think about it, the test costs 300$, it’s not much, however, if 3000 people are certed a year, that 900,000$, going directly to the development of Asterisk and its progress – and in my book, that’s a good thing.